Scandal of the £300 Chinese girl slaves

The one child rule has fuelled a slave trade, with female children as young as eight snatched for sale. Andrew Alderson and Lena Kara report.

By Andrew Alderson and Lena Kara

12:01AM BST 23 Jun 2002

At the market - a heaving mass of desperate souls - lascivious men eye up teenage girls. Two ramshackle sheds the size of aircraft hangars are crammed with young women, many with crude signs at their feet advertising their skills.

The girls are cooks, maids and seamstresses but many of the buyers are after a human commodity: a wife and servant who will satisfy their every need. Chengdu market in western China is the centre of a growing trade in female slaves.

Although the policy is less strictly enforced in rural areas, it is in these remote parts of the world's most heavily populated country that the imbalance is greatest. Here, young women are sold as servile wives for as little as £300 - half the annual average wage - by criminal gangs.

Many are traded at "labour markets" where the women are sold to owners who physically and sexually abuse them. Some women come voluntarily to the markets, but many have been snatched or bought from their families.

The one child per couple policy was introduced by the Chinese Government in 1980 to apply nationwide and was designed to combat the nation's population explosion. According to new official figures, 117 boys are born for every 100 girls in China.

The situaion has arisen because of female infanticide and selective abortion following scans to determine the sex of an unborn baby. Chinese peasants want boys to continue the family line, work the land and support them when they are old. A daughter is often described as "spilled water".

This newspaper's investigation centred on the western province of Sichuan. In a dusty room above a Chinese teashop, photographs of girls and young women are spread out on a wooden table. Behind the smiling faces lies human tragedy: all are victims of the human trade in the nation of 1.25 billion people.

In the room above the teashop, the man leafing through the photographs is Zhu Wenguang, a police vounteer who is trying to trace those snatched and sold as slaves. Notes are scribbled on the back of many of the photographs of the missing: Deng Xiaoying, sold to a farmer in Shanxi for 4,500 yuan (£450); Jiao Maihua sold to a fisherman, price unknown.

Zhu Wenguang has a file on more than 100 missing girls and young women, but he has rescued a similar number over the past seven years. He knows he must combat tradition to save the girls. Without official authority in distant provinces, he has to persuade local police forces to help.

"The men who buy these women are desperate for a wife," he said. "They are often twice the age of the women that they buy."

As he speaks, he produces a picture of an eight-year-old girl called Tian Xiadan. "The families that lose their children and relatives are the most desperate.

"This family called and begged me for help. It is very rewarding if I can do that but sadly, in this case, I have no leads."

Zhang Xiaolan, who was sold to a rural farmer and held for several months, managed to write a letter to to her parents while she was still in captivity. Although now free, the letter is a reminder of her ordeal: "The buyer is more than 30 years old, short and ugly with a bad temper. He beats me every time he is drunk," wrote Zhang, who is in her early twenties.

"When I escape the police bring me back; they don't care for me, a Sichuan girl. And then I get beaten nearly to death. I would kill myself but I want to see you [her parents] again."

Miao, who would not give her full name or age, had arrived at the Chengdu market the previous day. She was unskilled and looking for work as a cook. She was aware of the conmen hanging around. "I know all about the tricksters," she said.

"My sister was sold several years ago to a farmer in Shanxi Province. She managed to escape but only after six months of abuse. But that was several years ago and times have changed since then."

Among those to be rescued from a life of slavery is Zhuang Chunli. Now in her early 20s, she was a teenage farm girl when her ordeal began.

One day, while returning home, she met a young man who said he was visiting friends in her village. He befriended her and lured her away to a remote farm on the Mongolia-Russian border with a story that she should join him on an adventure with friends.

"It was barren and remote and we had no money. Then one morning they were all gone. I was left with the farmer and his three sons," she said.

"The farmer said to me, very coldly and flatly, that he had bought me for his middle son. I must obey the family and marry the son. I could do nothing, no one cared, and my parents were thousands of miles away."

Her ordeal lasted three years. "I was locked in with the middle son. He forced himself on me, he raped me. There was no point in fighting him. I had nowhere to run.

"I was treated more like a slave than a wife. They treated me with no humanity. I had cost them money so they treated me like a commodity.

"I tried to escape several times, but you could run for ten miles from the farmhouse and still they could see you. There was no escape. When they found me, they beat me with sticks and belts, whatever came to hand. They beat me almost to death.

"I stayed there for three years and had a child, a boy called Jing Bin. After I had the baby, I eventually persuaded them to let me write home. They thought that with a baby I would not want to escape. They more or less wrote the letter for me. I lied to my mother that I was happy."

She was rescued by her family, but was forced to leave her son behind.

The Chinese Embassy in London acknowledged the existence of a trade in human beings, but said there had been several initiatives to tackle the problem - 7,600 criminal gangs had been identified and targeted for abducting and trafficking in women and children.

"Sustained efforts have been made to protect women's rights in the political, economic, social, educational, marital, domestic and other spheres," said the spokesman.